– Diego Huerta traveled around Mexico as a photographer, capturing the Breathtaking Beauty of Mexico’s Indigenous Communities. As Huerta says, “in Oaxaca something very interesting happens: there is a mix of the modern and the traditional, of the indigenous people and the mestizo people, that fight to conserve that indigenous part that they inherited,”

Hola a todos! This Week in Review is quite long, but I assure you it is full of resources and knowledge that needs to be shared.

– ColorLines shared a recent snippet from the show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, inviting readers to “Watch John Oliver Break Down How School Resegregation Hurts Students.” “Black and Latino children are more likely to attend school with inexperienced teachers who are then less likely to offer a college prep curriculum… [and are] 6 times as likely to be in poverty schools.”

– The Horn Book published an article on “Decolonizing Nostalgia: When Historical Fiction Betrays Readers of Color” by Sarah Hannah Gómez, in which she writes: “Omitting nonwhites from episodic historical fiction and the everyday history that informs our lives today says that the only contribution by people of color to society is conflict. Deleting them from the continuous line of history is a lie that perpetuates this insidious myth. And middle-grade historical fiction has a long way to go to acknowledge this betrayal to readers and attempt to overcome it.”

— The blog, Reading While White, shared a guest post with one of our favorite authors, Yuyi Morales, who discusses “Day of the Dead, Ghosts, and the Work We Do as Writers and Artists.” Morales offers a beautiful discussion of her personal practices related to Día de los Muertos and the implications of its distortion in the general media and children’s books.

–The Zinn Education Project just shared The #NoDAPL syllabus for high school and adults. This resource contextualizes how the current resistance in North Dakota is tied to a “broader historical, political, economic, and social context going back over 500 years to the first expeditions of Columbus” and features the practices of “Indigenous peoples around the world [who] have been on the frontlines of conflicts like Standing Rock for centuries.” “

Saludos todos! As many parts of the country recently celebrated Columbus Day, and we are quickly approaching Thanksgiving, we wanted to take the time to draw attention to a new educational campaign, Abolish Columbus Day, created by the Zinn Education Project (a project of Teaching for Change and Rethinking Schools). Teaching for Change and Rethinking Schools are both excellent resources for educators interested in multicultural teaching, diverse literature and social justice, and we’ve featured their resources many times here on the blog. This initiative aims at rethinking Columbus Day and the way in which our history remembers the genocide and continued colonial practices against the indigenous peoples in the United States and Latin America.

– Our friends at Lee & Low Books posted on their blog an Alternative History Book List. The list is part of acknowledging Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, for which, they write, “we are offering a series of blog posts that look at pieces of history that have been hidden, silenced, altered, or swept under the rug.”

As in the past several years, we’re using the month of October to reflect on the many ways in which death is honored, acknowledged, and remembered in different Latin American countries. Our monthly focus is prompted in part by the upcoming Día de los Muertos, but also more broadly by the seasonal shift into autumn – a time of transition and change.

Last year we used this opportunity to feature books that discussed Día de los Muertos celebrations and cautionary legends such as those about La Llorona. This year, however, we have decided to expand these themes to focus more loosely on death as a general concept — the experience of love and loss, the process of grief and healing, and, particularly, the ways in which educators can help students through these tough moments. This month our books will feature protagonists who experience grief, and identify books that explore the concept of death in different cultures. This last theme is the focus of today’s book, Light Foot/ Pies ligeros.

¡Hola a todos! The month has passed by very fast. As we end September, think about the accomplishments and hard work people have done in just this one month to advocate for diverse literature and how much work still remains.

– Blood Orange Press has begun a campaign to publish books where “people of color and Native communities can tell their own story.” If you want to support them, their project is titled #ReadInColor.

– Lastly, in Facebook, Rethinking Schools encourages us to find out more about the Zinn Education Project- Teaching A People’s History. “Zinn’s work offers an alternative perspective that students need in order to think more critically about key issues in history,” expressed commenter William Thomas.

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Vamos a Leer is overseen by the Latin American & Iberian Institute (LAII) at the University of New Mexico. The LAII is designated a National Resource Center for Latin America by the U.S. Department of Education. The Vamos a Leer blog supports K-12 teaching about Latin America by providing resources to educators, including lesson plans, author + book suggestions, and related materials.

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